Hal Shepherd – Water Policy Consulting LLC

Kachemak Bay Watershed Collaborative

The Chugach Regional Resource Commission (CRRC) is an Alaska Native Tribal consortium in south-central Alaska whose Dena’ina, Alutiiq, and Sugpiaq villages and association members have stewarded of the Kachemak Bay watershed for over 10,000 years. CRRC’s mission is to promote Tribal sovereignty and protect subsistence lifestyles through the development and implementation of Tribal natural resource management programs to assure conservation and sustainable economic development in the traditional use area of the Chugach Region.

CRRC serves the greater Chugach region of Southcentral Alaska, including Lower Cook Inlet, Resurrection Bay, and Prince William Sound. Within Lower Cook Inlet CRRC will work with area member tribes to establish the Kachemak Bay Watershed Collaborative (Collaborative or KBWC) to protect salmon streams located within the Kachemak Bay Watershed (Watershed). The Athabascan and Sugpiaq communities located within the Watershed rely on a subsistence economy, as they have since time immemorial.

CRRC will engage a diverse group of stakeholders with land ownership or authority within the Watershed, including Federally recognized Tribal entities, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Alaska Departments of Natural Resources and Fish and Game, the municipalities of Homer, Kachemak Selo, Voznesenka and Razdolna, Seldovia and the unincorporated Native village communities of Nanwalek and Port Graham, and conservation organizations.

Many changes related to warming fresh and marine water temperatures impact the subsistence resources. Increasingly common drought conditions and spruce beetle outbreaks in the region threaten the health of the plants and animals rural communities rely upon for subsistence. These changes are happening at a rate no one thought possible even a decade ago. Land management activity within the Watershed can exacerbate such impacts. The Collaborative will work to be more inclusive of tribal and other local communities along with local, state, and federal stakeholders in monitoring, planning, and decision-making within the Watershed. The implementation of risk assessments and planning documents, along with preserving connectivity and non-climate stressor mitigation actions, will ensure better protection and management of salmon habitat in the Watershed.

Project location

The 4,926,794-acre Watershed is made up of five small watersheds located in the Kenai Peninsula Borough within the state of Alaska and encompasses the municipalities of Homer, Kachemak Selo, Voznesenka, Razdolna, Seldovia, and the unincorporated Alaska Native village communities of Nanwalek and Port Graham. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) Hydrologic Unit Codes (HUC) in which the group will work are: Cook Inlet, Stariski Creek-Frontal Cook Inlet, Fox River, Sheep Creek and Quiet Creek-Frontal Kachemak Bay Watershed HUC ID #s: 1902080000, 1902030108, 1902030110, 1902030109 and 1902030111 respectively.

Technical project description

There is currently is no group focused specifically on this Watershed, although a diverse array of stakeholders, including livestock grazers, tourist and recreation groups, industry, environmental organizations, recreation advocates, universities, land use, tribal, state and federal entities, municipalities and the general public utilize the area. This Watershed group will also help fill a planning gap left by the elimination of Alaska’s Coastal Zone Management program.

There are several ongoing or previous watershed planning activities, projects, or efforts related to the Watershed that the Collaborative will build upon, including:

The Kachemak Bay Fox-River Climate Risk Assessment analyzes current threats to salmon habitat within a portion of the Watershed, addresses salmon habitat connectivity and climate resiliency for the entire Watershed, and works with federal and state resource agencies to enter into cooperative agreements for management of salmon habitat on a watershed basis;
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game Fox River Flats Critical Habitat Area (FRFCHA) management plan addresses regulatory management goals for the FRFCHA and includes managing the area to 1) maintain and enhance fish and wildlife populations and their habitat; 2) minimize the degradation and loss of habitat values due to fragmentation, and; 3) recognize cumulative impacts when considering effects of small incremental developments and action affecting critical habitat resources.
The Kachemak Heritage Land Trust’s (KHLT) Krishna Venta Conservation Management Plan addresses working collaboratively with state, federal, and local entities as KHLT purchases and negotiates conservation easements on private lands for the purposes of management and protection of fish and wildlife habitat of KHLT’s 160 acres in the FRFCHA;
The Kenai Mountains To Sea – Land Conservation Strategy to Sustain Our Way of Life on the Kenai Peninsula calls for the creation of contiguous “green” corridors along 20 inter-jurisdictional anadromous streams, most of which originate on the Kenai Refuge. Such protection will increase the resiliency of these streams and the marine habitat into which they feed from the effects of a rapidly warming climate while ensuring that large piscivores such as brown bears and wolves persist to transport marine derived nutrients onto the landscape;
The Department of Natural Resources’ Kachemak Bay State Park and Kachemak Bay State Wilderness Park Management Plan addresses management of the 371,000- acre Kachemak Bay State Park and Kachemak Bay State Wilderness Park (State Park);
The Cook Inlet Keeper State of the Inlet watershed restoration plan within the Watershed captures threats and community-specific concerns and ideas to help direct CIK’s watershed-based organization as the plan future projects.

Join the Collaborative:

If you are a federal, state, or tribal entity, conservation group, or anyone else interested in the welfare and sustainability of Kachemak Bay, please join our Collaborative. If you have any questions please contact Hal Shepherd halshepherdwpc@gmail.com

Climate-Resilient Water Management: An operational framework from South Asia

Climate change is having an unprecedented impact on global water resources on which billions of people rely and because water is linked to everything else, global food, energy and economies are similarly affected by impacts on water systems. As a result, in 2014 the UK Department for International Development, sponsored the Action on Climate Today (ACT) program as a political compliment to technical or scientific strategies for addressing climate related impacts on water.

Using a Climate-Resilient Water Management (CRWM) approach as a way of increasing the resilience of global water systems, ACT has been working to encourage policies that manage and protect water systems from the impacts of climate change in the water sector. Although implemented in five South Asia countries, to date, this paper proposes that the ACT strategy for water management including assessment, supply augmentation and demand; floods and droughts and other extreme events; and public and governmental education on the need for CRWM, can be applied by practitioners and policy makers working in water resource management around the world.

The paper concludes by calling for the need for a new paradigm to meet the urgent need to address the rapidly growing global water crises including:

“1. Move beyond ‘business as usual’ to integrate the best available climate data and information in managing water resources;
2. Adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to mainstreaming the risk of climate change in programs and policy;
3. Map and lock into existing government priorities at different levels to secure political will;

4. Firmly acknowledge that CRWM is political as opposed to being a purely technical or scientific paradigm; • Frame and communicate about climate change using language and concepts that are relatable and impacts that are tangible;
5. Frame and communicate about climate change using language and concepts that are relatable and impacts that are tangible.”

Governor Dunleavy Nominations Graphite Creek Project to Fast-41 Permitting

Hot Springs Creek Below the Proposed Graphite One Mine Site

Due to Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s nomination of Graphite Creek project in the remote Kigluaik range north of Nome, as a high-priority infrastructure project, as eligible for new legislation intended to fast track the permitting process for transportation projects. Title 41 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, (Fast-41) adopted by Congress during the Obama administration which was intended to be a surface transportation reauthorization focusing on highway, transit, and rail programs. The Act establishes a new Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (FPISC), authorized to stream line the NEPA process including elimination of public review and comment. Due to the unprecedented authority provided to the Council, until now, the Act has traditionally been applied only to Infrastructure and transportation Projects.

However, mining companies and the Trump administration have been pressuring FPISC to include mining as a sector under the Act. According to the mining industry magazine Critical Minerals Alaska 2020, “a federal entity meant to provide a one-stop-shop capable of coordinating permits across different federal agencies, thereby streamlining and shortening the overall process for large infrastructure projects that are eligible for the program. Mining projects that supply the materials needed for the energy, communication, and transportation infrastructure in the U.S. may be eligible for Fast-41.” [1] If the proposed Graphite One Mine is included into Fast-41, Critical Minerals Alaska 2020 says it “could help reduce the seven to 10 years it takes the average large mining project in the U.S. to get through the permitting process.”[2]

The sudden surge in the mining of graphite and other precious minerals in Alaska results from a dramatic increase in demand for batteries, solar power, computers, and other high-tech products that require such minerals. For instance, graphite is a significant component of the lithium-ion batteries used for electric cars and some renewable energy systems. According to the World Bank , due to the growing global interest in such cars and energy, the demand for graphite, lithium, cobalt, and other battery metals could increase by nearly 500 percent by 2050.[1] The report says that, “[g]raphite demand increases in both absolute and percentage terms since graphite is needed to build the anodes found in the most commonly deployed automotive, grid, and decentralized batteries. ” Similarly, according the United States Geological Survey, there are currently no graphite mines in the United States, requiring American battery and other manufacturers to import 58,000 metric tons of graphite during 2019.[2] According to CMA2020, with “5.7 million metric tons of quality graphite outlined so far, Graphite One Inc.’s Graphite Creek deposit in Northwest Alaska could provide a reliable domestic supply of graphite to North America’s burgeoning lithium-ion battery sector.” [3]

[1] Shane Lasley, High priority Alaska REE, graphite projects Gov nominations elevate mine projects to Fast-41 permitting, p. 6-7, High priority Alaska 2020 (November 2, 2020).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Shane Lasley, Western Alaska deposit could feed graphite into supply chain, Mining News, CRITICAL MINERALS ALASKA, pp. 28-29 (2020)

Reversing Trump’s Environmental Policies Under a Biden Administration will be a Tall Order

This year’s presidential election was a close race in a handful of states. When the Associated Press announced that, for just the second time in 70 years, with the help from the Native vote, announced a decisive win for Democrat Joe Biden announced an ambitious Indian Policy as part of his campaign, over President Trump on November 7, 2020. This was partly due to record turnout throughout the country, including pivotal votes from Native Americans in key states. As of 2018, the state of Arizona alone which turned from red to blue this election cycle, members of federally recognized tribes made almost 6% of the population and the Navajo Nation alone contains around 67,000 eligible voters.

The question on everyone’s mind is whether a Biden win will end Trump’s war on the environment. If the democrats do not become the majority party in the senate, in order to stay on track with his environmental agenda, Biden will need to rely primarily on executive actions and essential legislative measures like tax reform, the federal budget and the Farm Bill. Just hours after the United States officially withdrew from the Paris accord, on the day after the election, for example, Biden announced that he would reverse that decision on the first day of his term in office.

During his candidacy, Biden also pledged to reverse several of Trump’s Alaska initiatives including drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and issuing a permit to develop the Pebble Mine. Also, in relation to Alaska Native Tribes Biden plans to create a new division of the Justice Department that will focus on environmental and climate justice and to incorporate environmental justice throughout EPA programs.

The key will be how hard will the Trump administration push for completion of it’s resource extraction agenda before he leaves office on January 20. Although, The Trump administration recently issued a request to energy companies to identify what specific land areas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should be offered for sale, this will be difficult due to the remaining environmental analysis, leasing logistics and the fact that global banks continue to adopt policies stating that they will not fund drilling in the Arctic due to climate change. And there’s also the fact that many of the Trump administrations decisions affecting BLM lands, including ANWR and the NPRA leasing were made by Scott Pendly who has been serving illegally as the Director of the Bureau of Land Management for the past 14 months.

Never one to let a small thing like the law get in the way of opening lands up to resource extraction activity however, Trump could simple move to put leases in ANWR and open up areas to mining, despite federal laws or even court orders to the contrary before leaving office. And then there’s the fact that Trump has not conceded the elections results to Biden and may not leave the Whitehouse at all.

The GOP’s slide towards Authoritarianism Under Trump

Despite the legitimate elections results, that the Trump administration, so far, has no intention of leaving the Whitehouse in January, is best illustrated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s response that “[t]here will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration” when recently asked by reporters about the transition of power to president elect Joe Biden. So while the Trump administration holds the country hostage during a pandemic that it has done little to control, it’s no wonder CNN’s Anderson Cooper vented his frustration by stating: “That is the president of the United States. That is the most powerful person in the world. We see him like an obese turtle on his back flailing in the hot sun, realizing his time is over.”

In her book “Fascism – A Warning” former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright is more direct: “If we think of Fascism as wound from the past that had almost healed, putting Trump in the White House was like ripping off the bandage and picking at the scab.” Albright says that “we have not had a chief executive in the modern era whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.”

The real concern for the future of democracy in the United States, however, is not Trump’s latest attention grabbing temper tantrum, but the fact that the GOP is not the same party it was before he took office. In fact, Senate Republican’s continued support for Trump’s current bullying behavior, signifies the party’s gradual move away from democratic principals that started long before the 2016 election.

In the summer of 2005, for example, President George W. Bush found that he had two opportunities to replace the U.S. Supreme Court Justices William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Conner with conservative idealogues, the New York times warned that we should “[i]magine a country in which Social Security, job safety laws and environmental protections were unconstitutional. Imagine judges longing for that. Imagine one of them as the next Supreme Court nominee [and then] imagine the American public is powerless to stop them.”

Ever since 2005, in addition to continuing to stack the courts, the republican party has been steadily moving further to the right and slowly consolidating power as it moves towards autocracy. In fact, the extent to which the party no longer adheres to democratic ideals and morals is so dramatic that just before the Nov. 3 election, an international team of political scientists was able to quantify it. The V-Dem Institute interviewed over 600 political experts from around the world who made assessments of political parties from different countries adherence to key democratic values and developed a report that illustrates the GOP’s continued it’s decline during the Obama administration with the rise of the tea party whose members accused president Obama of being both a socialist and a Nazi at the same time and suggested that he was subverting the Constitution and then dropped substantially in 2016 after Trump won the presidential election.

According to the V-Dem Institute scientists, GOP’s hedging toward authoritarianism has only become more apparent in the days following the 2020 election. Anna Lührmann political scientist with Sweden’s University of Gothenburg says “It is disturbing that most leading Republicans are still not objecting to President Trump’s baseless claims of electoral fraud and attempts to declare himself the winner.”

If there’s one thing republican leadership learned from Trump, it’s that, as long as you’re the party in power, you can get away with just about anything. As a result, the not only did the republican party’s hunger for more power sky-rocket under Trump, but both Republican and Democratic rejection of the use of violence against political opponents changed starting with the 2016 campaign. At that time, Trump encouraged violence against opposition protesters and then as President, praised Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte who was convicted of assault for body slamming a reporter and defended right-wing violence in relation to Black Lives Matters protesters.

That Trump’s violent rhetoric during the 2016 election, inspired even elected officials is illustrated by right-wing Kentucky Governor, Matt Bevin’s statement that violence against political opponents may be necessary if Hillary Clinton won. Then in September 2020, Facebook removed a post by Georgia republican congressional, candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene for violating a policy against inciting violence. Regardless, Taylor Greene, who ran largely un-opposed, won and is now serving as Georgia’s representatives in the House.

The transformation of the GOP under Trump therefore, is the realization that as long as they are the party in power, they can get away with just about anything. If democrats, therefore, fail to take the senate in the last election and the main focus of Senate Republicans will be to disrupt Biden’s agenda, so that they can re-claim the presidency in 2024.

As stated by Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Post the “V-Dem’s data underscores how much of Many of the GOP leaders going along with Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud will still be in office after he leaves.” Unless the Senate turns once all the ballots are counted, therefore, it best it will be difficult, for example, for Biden to obtain confirmation of cabinet, federal court and other nominees which must be approved by the increasingly authoritarian leaning senate. Similarly, with loss of seats in the House, Democrats lead will be slimmer there and many more will be reluctant to stick their necks out for democracy resulting in less decisive decisions on many issues. At worst, if the senate repulicans are not held accountable for embracing authoritarianism, the future of democracy is in jeopardy.

Our Anti-Environmental President

Op-Ed by Jessica Shepherd

President Trump’s claim in September that he is “the number one environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt” is as ironic as it is galling. In truth, it would be more appropriate to call Trump the number one anti-environmental president of all time for his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the greater environmental community.

Trump has consistently thumbed his nose at environmental protections by withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, his ongoing attempts to reinterpret touchstone environmental laws like the Migratory Bird Act, and through his appointments of climate-change denier Scott Pruitt, and then coal and oil ally Andrew Wheeler to head the EPA.

Kowtowing to Trump, the EPA, in defiance of their name and mission “to protect human health and the environment”, has steadily given in to industry interests — waving away concerns about pesticides, reducing constraints on toxic emissions in our air and water, scrapping requirements for mining companies to set aside cleanup funds, and loosening stream-side dumping regulations on the coal industry. Moreover, Trump has signed off on watered down EPA regulations intended to limit greenhouse gas emissions by reducing fuel economy standards and doing away with limits on methane flaring for oil and gas production on public lands. And let’s not forget Trump’s push for oil and gas leasing here in Alaska with the opening of the Arctic Coastal Plain to drilling and expansion into previously off-limit areas in the National Petroleum Reserve.

Talking advantage of a dire situation, in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic diverted our attention, the EPA suspended enforcement of environmental regulations on companies that were deemed unable to comply with emission standards due to the pandemic. At the same time, Trump signed an executive order scaling back the review process for new projects under the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Also, in March, the Department of Justice (DOJ) scraped the longstanding use of Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) to fund environmentally beneficial projects. According to the EPA “A SEP is an environmentally beneficial project that a violator voluntarily agrees to undertake in settlement of a civil penalty action, as an option to offset some portion of the monetary penalty. One goal of the SEPs is to improve the environmental health of communities that have been put at risk due to the violation of an environmental law.” SEPs were frequently used by the EPA to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy. Examples include investments in local wind and solar power generation, retrofitting diesel-powered school buses with pollution control devices, the purchase of hybrid vehicles for a National Park, and funding for energy-efficient building technology for public buildings.

Thanks to the Trump Administration, the air we breathe now contains higher levels of mercury and other toxic particulate matter from vehicles and coal-fired power plants, and CO2 levels, despite a downturn at the start of the pandemic, are once again trending upward toward an ill-fated future. Faced with another four years of Trump, we’ll need to rename the EPA the “Environmental Destruction Agency” (EDA) and rewrite its mission to better reflect its new role in destroying human health and the environment.

Mind you, this is just an overview of Trump’s egregious environmental rollbacks.

If there is any good news, it’s that Trump has not been completely successful in his vendetta against established environmental safeguards. For example, his attempt to water down the Migratory Bird Treaty Act would have resulted in a reinterpretation of the law to apply only to the intentional killing of birds, laying blameless those whose actions cause the “incidental” killing of millions of birds annually through industrial activities like power line electrocutions, toxic tailing ponds, or the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill that killed more than a million birds. A federal court overturned the policy revision in August of this year.

In contrast to Trump’s crusade against the environment, Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan would invest in net-zero emissions while creating new, green energy jobs. His 110-page plan will benefit first those communities who have been most directly affected by environmental violations, especially communities of color and the Native community. The comprehensive plan promises to “take immediate action to reverse the Trump Administration’s dangerous and destructive rollbacks of critical climate and environmental protections.”

Last Stand for the Tongass

The Tongass National Forest, the largest national forest in the United States, is a landscape comprised of old-growth Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and red and yellow cedar. These mighty trees, along with innumerable glacially-fed streams and lakes, give rise to all five species of Pacific salmon, humpback whales, healthy black and brown bear populations, wolves, and omnipresent bald eagles. Located in southeastern Alaska, the 17 million acre Tongass is the size of West Virginia and home to 70,000 people, including the First Nation people of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian, and the city of Juneau, Alaska’s state capital. It is also the largest expanse of roadless wilderness in the national forest system, at least for now.

Protected by the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule (signed into effect by President Bill Clinton), 55% of the Tongass, or 9.2 million acres, is off limits to road construction and timber sales. But, in January 2018, under Governor Bill Walker’s administration and with the backing of the Trump Administration, the State of Alaska petitioned the Secretary of Agriculture to consider exempting the Tongass from the Roadless Rule.

Under the federal National Environmental Policy Act, any consideration to exempt the Tongass from the Roadless Rule requires a 60-day public comment period and a scientific analysis of environmental impacts to the Tongas. The 60-day public comment period, conducted this summer, fell well short of its obligation according to tribal members who received last-minute notice of public meetings. In their opinion, the comment period “exemplifies the federal government’s long-running failure to adequately work with tribes.” In response, eleven southeast Alaskan tribes vested in the outcome of the upcoming ruling, filed a petition in July, requesting the USDA consult with tribes “on a government-to-government basis.” Earlier attempts by area tribes to engage in the two-year process were derailed because “the USDA repeatedly ignored their input and requests for in-person meetings; fast-traced seemingly arbitrary deadlines; and proceeded as usual despite a pandemic that has disproportionally hurt Native communities.”

The Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), was released on September 24, 2020 and analyzes six alternatives, including a no-action alternative. Trump-appointed USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue prefers Alternative 6 which “provides maximum additional timber harvest opportunities,” removing “all 9.37 million inventoried roadless acres on the Tongass from roadless designation.” Moreover, “Alternative 6 would revert a net total of 168,000 old growth-acres and 20,000 young-growth acres, previously identified as unsuitable timber lands, to suitable timber lands”. The Tongas will “continue to be managed by the Forest Plan and in accordance with applicable statutory instructions.” There is a 30-day waiting period following the release of the EIS prior to implementation to allow for review.

If you want to weigh in against opening up the Tongas, please see the following websites.

https://addup.sierraclub.org/campaigns/keep-alaskas-tongass-national-forest-roadless

https://act.nrdc.org/letter/tongass-forest-181004

Your voice matters.

Public Lands Management Under Trump Descends into Chaoss

President Donald Trump’s appointment of William Perry Pendley as Director of the Bureau of Land Management who is openly hostile to environmental regulations, has turned into yet another legal debacle typical of the current administration. Pendley’s inflammatory statements and open opposition to social justice and diversity including for native and African American communities, statements that public lands should be privatized, conflicts of interest, unethical conduct, support of anti-government extremists and efforts to dismantle the BLM, have outraged conservation and tribal organizations throughout the western U.S. It, therefore, quickly became obvious to Interior Secretary David Bernhardt that because of Pendley’s record, there would be no way he would obtain confirmation from congress if the administration did what was legally required and nominate him for that purpose. In fact, in a procedure that the U.S. Supreme Court calls a “critical structural safeguard” of democracy, the Appointments Clause of the Constitution requires that the heads of prominent federal agencies be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate” a standard that is also found in the federal Vacancies Reform Act.

Especially when it comes to dismantling environmental regulatory standards, however, the Trump administration has never been that concerned with federal law or, for that matter the U.S. Constitution and Bernhardt resolved the issue of Pendley’s radical anti-public land views, racism and support of extremists simply by repeatedly extending Pendley’s appointment as Director of the agency for the past 13 months.

As a result, in July 2020, the state of Montana and several conservation organizations filed a lawsuit to enjoin Bernhardt from continuing to extend Pendley’s status as Acting Director of BLM. This prompted Trump to finally put Pendley’s name before congress as required only to almost immediately remove it because of concerns of several republican senators in key states who are up for election about the audacity of the appointment. However, rather than remove Pendley as acting Director in accordance with with the law, Secretary Bernhardt announced that Pendley will “stay on leading BLM” as the bureau’s deputy director of policy and programs, who is also “exercising the authority of director.”

This, once again, got the attention of the Montana U.S. District Court which as part of the lawsuit filed by the state and conservationists a couple months before, promptly enjoined Pendley from exercising such authority and Bernhardt from unlawfully delegating the authority of the BLM director to him. In fact, the Court’s declaration that Pendley served unlawfully as the Acting Director of the BLM for well over a year, also meant that many of the decisions he made during that time were similarly illegal, threatening Trump’s strategy to dismantle protections of public lands and open them up to development.

Chief Judge Brian Morris found that “’any function or duty’ of the BLM Director that has been performed by Pendley would have no force and effect and must be set aside as arbitrary and capricious” and instructed DOI to compile any such acts and provide a full report to the Court. Therefore, any of the official actions Pendley took over the 424 preceding the decision including opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the National Petroleum reserve to oil drilling,” or vast acreages of public lands, including areas relied on by Native village communities for subsistence, to mining, are potentially unauthorized.

From GOP Power Grab to Trump Super Spreader

The recent passing of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, has given the GOP the opportunity to make another power grab, this time, in the form of rush to make a life-time appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court before the 2020 presidential election. Within days of Ginsberg’s death, Trump announced that he had already begun the search for a replacement and that the replacement would take place within the next 7 weeks before the election.

This is contrary to Senates practice over the past 40 years which has consistently taken almost 3 months to appoint Supreme Court justices including selection by the President, vetting by the Senate Judiciary Committee and then a final vote on the Senate floor. Now that the republican controlled senate eliminated the filibuster in 2017, the party that controls the senate could go through the entire process without a single vote from the minority party.

Based on this process and arguing that appointments to the Supreme Court should not take place in an election year, when Justice Anthony Scalia died in 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, refused to hold a confirmation vote for President Obama’s nominee – Merrick Garland. Similarly, during a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting in opposition to Garland’s appointment, Committee chair, Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, was even more emphatic “use my words against me. If there’s a Republican president (elected) in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first term, you can say Lindsey Graham said, ‘Let’s let the next president, whoever it might be, make that nomination.’”

Within hours of Ginsberg’s death, however, Senate republicans seem to have lost their compassion for letting the democratic process run it’s course, when McConnell called for a floor foot on and Graham said he would support anyone President Trump nominated. Even Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski who, after Trump announced the move to rush the nominee through the Senate, and recalling the GOP commitment in 2016, said she “would not support taking up a potential Supreme Court vacancy this close to the election,” began back tracking just days after making this pronouncement. She now says she could vote in favor of the Trump’s nominee if process is not being rushed to meet “a deadline that is hard and fast.”

However, the Senate Republic and Trump’s latest judicial power grab and an unanticipated backlash after Trump announced Amy Coney Barrett a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit judge and former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia as his pick to replace Ginsberg, when held his now infamous COVID-19 super spreader meet and great for the new nominee. As a result several of the senators present at the event have since tested positive for the disease and are now attending Judge Barrett’s confirmation hearings which began on Monday October 12. Sen. Graham who was also present at the meet and greet for Judge Barrett has refused to be tested for COVID.

The ill-regard for the health of others and the rushed proceedings has caused consternation among democrats. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that this “sham hearing — on a holiday, 22 days from Election Day, during a COVID-19 outbreak in the Judiciary Committee with a likely-exposed Chairman who won’t get tested — shows just how far the GOP will go to steal another Supreme Court seat & hand our courts over to extremists…”

As if to confirm the lopsided and calamitous process, instead of the usual manner for announcing a Supreme Court Justice confirmation hearing, in which the chairman states that the hearing is for the purpose of “considering the nomination,” instead, Graham pronounced that this is “the hearing to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court…”

Because the vote in the Senate to confirm Judge Barrett could be close, every vote will count. Contact Senator Murkowski and tell her that rush to place another conservative idealogue on the Supreme Court threatens the basis of democracy the country was founded on and that she should stick to her original commitment to wait until after the election to fill the position.

Unflagging Opposition to Business-as-Usual Extraction Practices

With Present Trump rolling back one environmental policy after another, ongoing efforts to slow global warming, safeguard wilderness, and provide clean water and air can seem futile. But never doubt that a handful of thoughtful, committed lawsuits can change the world. Indeed, it may be the only recourse that can.

We need look no farther than the Gwich’in Native community for inspiration when it comes to fighting to protect the environment. For more than thirty years they have resisted attempts to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. Under Trump’s plan to open lease sales across the entire coastal plain, that fight has kicked into high gear. For the Gwich’in, the coastal plain, birthing grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd which numbers approximately 200,000, is sacred ground. Their culture, history and way of life revolve around the caribou and the 1.5 million-acre expanse of coastal lands. Sarah James, Gwich’in elder, explains, “We have a special connection in that we are a part of the caribou and the caribou are part of us. It is our language, our songs, our dance…. We take care of the caribou, and in return, they take care of us, and that’s really important to my people here.”

The Gwich’in Sterring Committee, along with several other plaintives including Canada’s Yukon chapter of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, filed a lawsuit in late August, seeking to overturn Trump’s approval for oil leasing, and siting violations of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and likely impacts to the Porcupine Caribou Herd.

A second lawsuit to halt oil leasing on the Refuge filed by The National Audubon Society, Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, and Center for Biological Diversity sight insufficient concern over increased greenhouse gas emissions and melting permafrost, poor air quality, and negative impacts to the region’s wildlife.

And most recently, a third lawsuit to overturn drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was filed on September 9th with the U.S. District Court in Anchorage by attorneys general for 15 states and led by Washington and Massachusetts. The lawsuit states that drilling will contribute to global climate change and its effects such as sea level rise and extreme weather events.

A number of other environmental legal battles continue in Alaska and Siberia. In North-western Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, Trump seeks to overthrow Obama-era safeguards by expanding development into regions of the Reserve long slated for protection. Two recent lawsuits are pushing back against expanded development in NPR-A oil leasing. The lawsuits are in response to the final environmental impact statement released by the Bureau of Land Management in June allowing oil leasing on 18.7 million acres in the 23-million-acre reserve, including drilling in Teshekpuk Lake. Teshekpuk is the largest lake on the North Slope and provides critical habitat for migratory waterfowl and shorebirds.

And while a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s reversal of restrictions on Pebble Mine was dismissed in US District Court, Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan has joined a growing rank of conservatives who are openly opposed to the Pebble mine project. The proposed gold, molybdenum and cooper mine, in South-central Alaska’s Lake and Peninsula region, is recognized as a threat to the nationally-significant Bristol Bay salmon fisheries. Following the release of secret recordings by Pebble executives, Sullivan stated in a tweet on September 24^th, “Let me be even more clear: I oppose Pebble Mine. No Pebble Mine.” This follows a surprise stipulation issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in late August to Dynasty Minerals Ltd requiring the mine owners to outline how they will offset damage to wetlands and any impacts to the Bristol Bay salmon fishery. Other conservatives who oppose the mine, at least as it is currently proposed, including Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, Donald Trump Junior and Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

In the southern part of the state, Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, and other conservation groups including the Chilkat Indian Village of Klukwan, lost lawsuits in federal district court and the Ninth Circuit court which sought to challenge federal permits issued to the Palmer mine project near Haines. The Constantine Metal Resources Ltd. obtained permits to build 2.5 miles of roads across U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands to access zinc, copper, gold and silver deposits. The lawsuit argued that BLM did not factor in future mining development at the Palmer mine and impacts on the 3,000 bald eagles and spawning salmon along the nearby Chilkat River.

In southeastern Alaska, the Trump administration is zeroing in on the Tongass National Forest, seeking to exclude this, the nation’s largest national forest, from the Clinton-era roadless rule. A much-disputed study by the U.S. Forest Service states that lifting protections “will not significantly harm the environment.” By year’s end, the Trump administration hopes to open vast tracts of pristine old growth forest to road construction and timber sales. Recent lawsuits blocking timber sales that failed to identify impacted areas, and for deficiencies in the review process have stalled the sales process several times. That pushback resulted in the Trump administration implementing the new roadless rule exemption.

Meanwhile, in the Russian far north, a lawsuit has been filed against Norilsk Nickle seeking 1.96 billion dollars in damages for a May 29^th fuel spill. The spill, blamed on melting permafrost, dumped 21,000 tons of diesel into the Ambarnaya and Daldykan rivers which feed into Lake Pyasino before emptying into the Arctic Ocean. The spill is one of the largest ever recorded in the Arctic and has been compared with Alaska’s 1989 ExxonValdez spill, in part because both spills coincided with the spring migration — just as birds and fish are returning to their natal grounds.

The one take-away the Gwich’in can offer in this legal playing field is don’t give up. The fights for the Coastal Plains, the Tongas, and the headwaters of Bristol Bay continue, one lawsuit at a time. For Gwich’in elder Sarah James it’s straight forward. “We’re not a nonprofit. We’re not a movement. We’re not a corporation. We’re a neets’aii Gwich’in tribal government, and that’s how we’re now taking on this issue, government-to-government, and we’re standing our ground.”